


Metacrisis, Interrupted

by cereal, gallifreyburning



Series: fic tennis [7]
Category: Doctor Who, Doctor Who (2005)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-01-21
Updated: 2014-01-21
Packaged: 2018-01-09 14:20:30
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 18,183
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1147000
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cereal/pseuds/cereal, https://archiveofourown.org/users/gallifreyburning/pseuds/gallifreyburning
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When the Metacrisis Doctor touches down in the London of Pete's Universe, he realizes that Rose Tyler has been living a life without him for quite some time. That advice he gave her so long ago -- "Have a fantastic life, Rose. Do that for me" -- she's taken it more to heart than he'd realized.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

[gallifreyburning](http://gallifreyburning.tumblr.com/):

The minute they hit Bergen and Rose’s mobile locks onto a satellite signal, her screen lights up with missed messages. Messages that, apparently, didn’t make the dimension jump to another universe with her.

The little flashing notifications make Rose’s stomach churn, because she can begin to guess whose voices are on the other end of those voicemails, and she doesn’t have the stamina to listen to them anytime soon.

The Doctor leans over as they walk into the dirigiport, heading for the flight home to London. “Got tired of universal roaming?” he says. “A bit of shiny Torchwood tech?”

She flicks the button to dim the screen and crams the newer mobile in her pocket. “I’ve still got my old one,” she says, pulling it out instead. The battered, scratched screen lights up when she flips it open. “See? But the new one, it’s because I needed a local number.”

“Ooh, but they don’t make them like this anymore,” the Doctor says, plucking the old mobile from her hand and inspecting it. “Like tanks, these older models. Those new flashy ones” – he gestures toward her pocket – “bit of a bump, and they’re deader than a doornail. Nearly universally true: earlier models are sturdier than newer ones. VanVeldenberg’s Principle, it’s called. Take my TARDIS, Type 40. Anything after the Type 57 was pure rubbish. Type 103 had a lot of flash and dazzle, but the slightest miscalibration in her temporal buffers and she’d break down for weeks. Welllll, when I say break down, I mean she’d just refuse to fly – 103s were notorious for being touchy, a bit emotionally sensitive, y’see. Nope, you just don’t get much better than a good old Type 40 for reliable time travel.”

Rose stares up at him, her mouth hanging open a little. Because he sounds like the other Doctor – so much, it makes her stomach start churning again.

And it’s obvious that, for a moment, he’s not thinking about the fact that the TARDIS is off in another universe with the proper Time Lord; he’s talking as though he and Rose are going to round the corner and hop right inside those blue doors and head off to visit Genghis Khan (if this universe even had a Genghis Kahn, Rose isn’t sure, because she’s spent the last few years studying theoretical physics and transdimensional travel instead of history).

The Doctor stares down at her, his eyes widening as he seems to come to the same realization she just did, before he gives her back the old phone. Shoves his hands into his pockets and swallows, rocking back on his heels a little.

“Pete’s booked us a commercial flight home; sending the private zeppelin would take too long,” Jackie says from behind them, her own mobile pressed to her ear. “Tickets are waiting at the check-in counter.”

It turns out Pete bought up every seat on the commercial flight and made a call to the Norwegian Transportation Minister, and they hardly have a chance to buckle in on the otherwise empty zeppelin before they’re airborne.

As the propellers whir to life, the Doctor plops down into one of a group of four seats facing each other, and Jackie sits across the aisle, flagging down the flight attendant for a drink. Rose hovers indecisively in the aisle before sitting cattycorner to the Doctor, in the same group of four seats. His gaze flickers to the empty seat beside him and his brows draw together before he turns to stare out the window.

Rose pulls out her newer mobile and, keeping the screen tucked close to her own chest, thumbs through the call notifications. A dozen from her mum and Mickey (apparently from before they’d stormed the Dimension Cannon and come looking for her, what feels like a lifetime ago), a few from Pete, one from her lab manager at Torchwood, one from a credit card company (she’d forgotten to pay her bills before that last jump, and it’s remarkable, even during a world-ending catastrophe, the collections department is still functioning).

In the midst of all the others are two messages from a number she knows by heart, even if she’s never worked up the nerve to program his name into her phone.

She shuts the mobile off and closes her eyes the rest of the way back to London.

[allrightfine](http://allrightfine.tumblr.com/):

~~~~~

The zeppelin is just beginning its descent when Rose finally opens her eyes, and the Doctor watches as she focuses her gaze on his trainers. He’d stretched his legs out and propped his feet on the seat next to her, trying to get comfortable in the cramped space.

There’s a small pile of sand that had shaken off his soles and Rose moves her fingers toward it, pulling away at the last second.

Instead she follows the line of his legs with her eyes, tracking up his body in a way that makes him feel like she’s looking for something. If he knew what it was, he’d do his best to show it to her, but he doesn’t and has to settle for moving his feet back to the floor and plastering on a grin.

“Sleep well?” He says when she finally reaches his face.

There’s something tense and unknown between them,  _several_  somethings in fact, and he can tell from the way Jackie is watching them out of the corner of her eye that she feels it, too.

“Slept fine, seems I was a bit more knackered than I thought,” she says. “Haven’t been getting enough rest apparently.”

He starts to reply, trying to decide if it’s his place to softly chide her or if he should make a joke about he’ll need much more sleep now, too, when Jackie jumps in.

“I told you, Rose, you can’t be running yourself exhausted, it’s not healthy,” she says, pausing to turn to the Doctor as Rose sighs.

“We could barely get her to eat those last few days,” Jackie says. “She was on the move so much. I told her, Mickey told her — Pete told her, and she just wouldn’t listen.”

The way Jackie hesitated before Pete’s name makes the Doctor wonder what’s being kept from him. It’s like she was going to say someone else, but thought better of it. He’s hardly in a place to push it though, and lets his opening slip by.

Rose sighs again and the Doctor thinks briefly of the Phreazians, and their entire language based on expelling their breath in different ways. He’ll never visit the Phreazians again, never be nearly arrested for daring to whistle in the palace again.

Maybe it’s just not hit him fully yet, but it doesn’t seem so bad. Or, well, it wouldn’t, except that Rose is keeping herself so guarded now, it seems unlikely that’s he going to get nice and breathy with her anytime soon either.

“That’s over now,” Rose says. “I can have lie-ins for the rest of my life, if I’d like.”

Her tone isn’t unkind, but the way she uses “I” instead of “we” — well, it’s not something he’s chuffed over, to say the least.

Jackie nods, brow furrowed like she wants to say more, but she turns more fully back into her own seat just as the zeppelin touches down.

It’s quick work to get them de-boarded and into the terminal and the Doctor wonders if everything in the Tyler family is so efficient now.

Rose guides them out to the passenger pick up, barely stopping to look at him, or at anything, really, and he has to trot after her to catch up a few times, distracted as he is by the shops and the people and the overhead announcements.

There’s so much information, so much happening, it’s all so fast, with Rose leading the charge, and he thinks briefly that life on the slow path is moving awfully quick.

[gallifreyburning](http://gallifreyburning.tumblr.com/):

“Jackie!”

The voice snaps the Doctor’s attention into focus, right to Pete Tyler, waiting beside a limo with a little blond boy, about four years old.

“Mum!” the boy shouts, breaking into a run toward them, nearly tackling Jackie to the ground when he leaps into her arms. She squeals happily and swings him up off the ground, murmuring in his ear. Pete’s only a few steps behind, sweeping them both into a hug, tears in his eyes.

Rose and the Doctor stand a few feet away, more than a little distance between the two of them. Shuffling feet, staring at the ground. Rose’s arms are crossed, and the Doctor decides it  _might_  be – yes  _definitely_  would be – awkward if he reached across her chest and pried out one of her hands to hold.

Finally Jackie puts the boy down and it’s Rose’s turn for a hug. She falls to her knees and holds him tight. Afterward the boy turns to examine the Doctor, little brown eyes squinting up at him.

“Da says you’re the Doctor,” he says.

The Doctor crouches down to get at eye-level. “And you must be the infamous Tony Tyler. Your mum’s told me  _loads_ about you.” Which is very true; while Rose slept during the hours on the zeppelin, Jackie talked the entire time, almost every word of it about Tony. Which was fine enough – the Doctor likes kids – but between Jackie’s two children, Tony wasn’t the one the Doctor  _wanted_ to hear an hours-long update on.

Pete’s just letting go of Rose as he interrupts: “Listen, I tried to keep this all quiet, but the stars are back in place and the world knows  _something’s_ happened, and Torchwood’s in damage control mode, but there’s only so long we can stop word of your coming home from leaking out. So let’s take all this into the car, all right?”

They pile into the limo, and Rose steps aside, lets the Doctor slip in first. He settles into his seat and realizes she’s done it again, sitting on the opposite side of the car just like she did in the zeppelin.

Which is fine, really. This is all very new for everyone, he knew time ran at a different speed in this universe, but Rose has been away from him for four years, which is more than he’d expected. And his chest feels rather lopsided. And it isn’t as if he expected her to hop right into his arms and stay there.

Well, there was certainly a bit of hopping on the beach, a bit of lapel pulling and a bit of tongue and it was a definite  _yes,_ he’d thought, in terms of his offer. About the one life and everything.

He’s fairly certain. About that yes.

Almost positive.

As the limo pulls away from the dirigiport, Tony chattering away next to the Doctor, he watches from the corner of his eye as Rose pulls out her new cell phone, which is quietly buzzing. She pushes a button, the buzzing stops, and the phone goes back into her pocket.

The first stop is an apartment building in central London, not far from Canary Wharf. The car pulls up to the curb, the driver opens the door, and in the midst of a suddenly awkward silence, Rose steps out of the limo.

[allrightfine](http://allrightfine.tumblr.com/):

Is he supposed to follow her? If he were supposed to follow her, she’d at least have looked at him, right? Nodded her head at the door, something,  _anything_?

He can’t see her face anymore, she’s standing too close to the car and he’s hampered by the doorframe. All he has to go on is the way she’s standing — bouncing on her feet while her fingers fiddle with the zip on her jacket.

It certainly  _looks_  like she’s waiting for him, but maybe he’s being presumptuous. And he’s already gotten himself into enough trouble  _presuming_  things today.

Presuming that kiss had meant something.

Presuming she was going to want to be just as close to him as he wants to be to her.

Presuming he had any idea what he was in for, holding Rose’s hand as the TARDIS disappeared.

Tony Tyler’s voice breaks through his list of presumptions, “Are you coming to our house?”

~~~~~

Rose hears her little brother’s voice and smiles in spite of herself. At least  _someone_  in that car hadn’t noticed the tension, then.

She ducks her head down to be able see Tony properly, “No, he’s going to come to my flat for a bit. But maybe we’ll stop by tomorrow, how would that be?”

There’s a split second for her to think that maybe the Doctor doesn’t  _want_  to come to her flat, but then he’s shifting from the seat and climbing not altogether gracefully from the car to stand next to her.

“Okay,” Tony nods, and leans back in his seat, eyes forward, like the matter is settled and they can begin moving any time now.

Her mum gives her a tight-lipped smile and she returns it before shutting the car door.

The Doctor shifts beside her as the driver maneuvers the limo back into traffic.

She thinks about this new pattern in her life, where she stands beside this version of the Doctor while people she loves leave her, and she tries to latch onto that, tries to make the emotions tumbling through her about being left, instead of who she’s been left  _with_.

It doesn’t take. He’s something she never fathomed, never in a million years, never in a million universes, and although something in her heart is already in love with him, something in her head doesn’t quite know how that fits into her life here.

The two were never meant to meet.

It’s not doing any good to stand on the street and think about it though, so she turns for the door of her building.

“This is me,” she says and motions for him to follow.

There are signs, potted plants, tile and bricks, things for them to look at as they make their way to the lift and up to her floor, and they both give them all a thorough scrutinizing. There’s a sign for a tenants’ association meeting next Tuesday and Rose shakes her head, she hadn’t even known they  _had_  a tenants’ association.

Tim probably knew.

Tim who is good at noticing things, like paper signs and how the person he’s sleeping with still fancies a time-traveling alien she hasn’t seen in years.

Tim who she’s got six messages from.

Tim who could be sitting in her flat, for all she knew.

She keys into the door holding her breath. That doesn’t sound like Tim at all, but stranger things have happened. Like the Doctor becoming two people and her getting one to take home to Pete’s World.

Tim is nowhere to be seen when she gets the door open and Rose tries not to let her relief show, but the Doctor catches it anyway.

“Everything all right?” He says, and she almost laughs because she can’t possibly know the answer to that. On one hand, everything seems right, on the other, nothing does.

“Yeah, yeah,” she bluffs. “Thought I left the curling iron on, just glad not to be walking into a flat flambé.”

The Doctor smiles, “I hear that pairs best with red wine.”

[gallifreyburning](http://gallifreyburning.tumblr.com/):

“That’s the most brilliant idea I’ve heard in ages,” Rose says, dropping her keys on the table beside the front door and heading into the kitchen. There isn’t much food here; she was gone so often just before the last jump, as they got progressively closer to the Doctor and the Daleks, that whenever she managed to sleep, it was on a cot in the lab at Torchwood. She can’t remember the last time she changed her sheets, or whether she has any clean towels in the bathroom, or if she turned on the dishwasher before the last time she left.

Food, sleep, and clean dishes seemed like a low priority, compared to finding the Doctor again.

She wasn’t, in all honesty, planning on coming back.

And now the Doctor – or  _a_ Doctor – is standing in her kitchen, nose wrinkled as he sniffs the air. “Ohh, ripe.” She pulls open a cabinet as he peeks inside the dishwasher and leans back, making a face. “It’s been a while since I’ve stepped into a standard issue Western twenty-first century Earth kitchen, but aren’t these machines supposed to, I dunno, get rid of the rotten food smell, instead of making things worse?” He brightens. “I could fix it, if it needs fixing. Or improve it even, make it a bit more sonic – infinitely more efficient at cleaning dishes than these old water-based machines.”

Rose yanks a bottle of wine out of her cabinet and bumps the dishwasher closed with her hip as she walks past. “Yeah, if I’d remembered to start it before I ran off to confront the Daleks, it wouldn’t have turned into a science experiment in there. Let’s worry about it later. First, we need a drink and a shower.” She freezes, corkscrew mid-air, the back of her neck prickling icy-hot at the way the room has suddenly grown still.

Clearing her throat, Rose goes to work opening the bottle. “I mean, you can take the first shower, if you’d like. Since you’re” – the words  _my_   _guest_ are on the tip of her tongue, she doesn’t know how she feels about that, whether he actually  _is_ a guest – “sandier than I am. You left a few dunes in the zeppelin.”

The Doctor has retreated, he’s hovering in the doorway of the kitchen, one hand rubbing the back of his head. He’s starting to look more than a little lost, more than a little skittish.

Rose knows this look, she’s seen it on his face when they were in the court of the Regent of Parmatax Zed, and they were forced to watch a pantomime show put on by humanoid kittens. And that one time she’d been craving a midnight snack and the Doctor stumbled in on her wearing a short nightie in the TARDIS kitchen.

 _Not him,_  something whispers in the back of Rose’s head.  _The other him._

She ignores the voice and does what she’s always done when the Doctor looks lost – takes his hand.

“We’ll give the wine a chance to breathe a bit. C’mon, bathroom’s this way.” He doesn’t say a word as she ushers him into the small room, turns on the water, puts a towel in his hands. “Take your time. I’ll see about ordering us some supper, yeah?”

She closes the door.

Forty-five minutes later, the water’s still running. Rose is beginning to wonder if maybe the Doctor forgot to step into the shower, if he’s still standing beside the sink with the towel in his hand and looking baffled.

Before she works up the nerve to check on him, there’s a knock at the front door. And it’s about time, because the food was supposed to be delivered a while ago.

The sound of the water switches off in the bathroom as she opens the door.

It isn’t the delivery man outside.

[allrightfine](http://allrightfine.tumblr.com/):

Her heart drops as her eyes land on the expensive trainers shifting on the floor of the hallway, but she pulls back and it’s not Tim after all, it’s Henry from next door.

He grins at her and shoves over a bundle of mail, “Hi Rose, my mum was keeping this for you, your box was overflowing.”

She shuffles through the stack on reflex, bill, bill, notice, magazine, advert, “Thanks, Henry, and thank your mum for me as well.”

She moves to close the door when Henry speaks again, “Hey, listen, is Tim in there? Got some new kicks yesterday,” he points at his trainers. “He’s gonna go mental when he sees them. Not even supposed to be out yet.”

Rose laughs, she doesn’t quite understand the impulse to stand in line for hours for shoes, but it makes both of them happy, and anyway, she’s not really in a position to judge how people fill their time. Not when she spends her own chasing aliens and jumping across time and space.

 _Spent_  her time. Not anymore. Not ever again.

“No,” she says. “He’s not here, but I’ll be sure to tell him.”

Henry nods, turning to leave, but he catches sight of something behind her and Rose watches his eyes widen.

Her stomach flips before she’s even turned around, he’s definitely spotted the Doctor, she knows it.

Maybe it won’t be so bad. Maybe Henry will think he’s only a friend. She forces herself to look.

He’s just in a towel.

So much for that.

“Rose, do you have anything to wear? Just while I get my clothes sorted? They’re still pretty sandy and I — ” The Doctor trails off as he spots Henry. “Oh, hello!”

The Doctor’s voice doesn’t waver, but he edges himself closer to the sofa, plucking a pillow from the end and hugging it to his chest with forced nonchalance. It’s almost like he’s embarrassed, and isn’t that novel?

Henry raises a hand politely, but he’s already scooting further into the hall, shaking his head back and forth like he’s trying to clear the scene from his mind.

“I’ll just go,” he says. “My mum probably needs me.” And he darts down the hall.

That went well. Henry’s faster on his mobile than anyone Rose has ever seen, he’d could’ve already texted Tim just in the time it took to close the door. Maybe it’d be better that way.

She turns back to the Doctor as he drops the pillow back to the sofa, hands still hovering over it like he thinks he might need it.

“Sorry about that, next knock should be food,” she says. “Let me just grab you something to wear.”

She drops the mail on the coffee table and heads off down the hall.

~~~~~

He feels a lot of things, standing in the middle of Rose’s flat, naked but for a towel. He feels awkward, happy, cold, tired, lonely, overjoyed — he’s only been human for a matter of hours and he already feels like he’s locked down the full spectrum of their emotions.

The sound of Rose rummaging through drawers is echoing down the hallway and he can’t decide if it’s sillier to keep standing exactly where she left him, or to sit on her sofa in a towel.

He doesn’t want it to seem like he’s completely lost without her, even if it’s a little bit true, at least right now, so he rounds the sofa and settles down on the edge, trying not to get too much of the fabric wet from the towel.

Her mail sits in front of him on the small table and he reads her name over and over again, mouthing along with it, “Rose Tyler, Rose Tyler, Rose Tyler.”

There’s a trashy tabloid magazine lying incongruously in the middle of the pile and he squints to see the tiny address label on it — “Rose Mickeyrules Tyler” — ah, that explains that, a joke subscription.

He picks it up anyway, leafing through the pages before one makes him stop.

[gallifreyburning](http://gallifreyburning.tumblr.com/):

Rose is the mysteriously-appearing heir to an immensely wealthy and influential Pete Tyler, along with her mysteriously-resurrected mum who somehow survived a Cyber-conversion; it isn’t unusual, the Doctor thinks, for Rose and her family to be in the tabloids.

What  _is_ unusual is that whatever else is happening in the picture – red carpet, ridiculous fashion, onlooking crowds – Rose is holding some other bloke’s hand. Someone who is  _not_ the Doctor. She’s grinning, her entire body turned toward him, her tongue touching the corner of her mouth in the same way it does when she grins at the Doctor.

When she  _used_ to grin at the Doctor; she hasn’t done that as much, not since they were all in the console room of the TARDIS, nine of them piloting Earth back to its sun. Then, Rose had beamed and laughed and looked at this half-human him with curiosity and wonder. And since they’d landed in Norway and the other Time Lord had scampered off without a word, that tongue hadn’t touched her lips, not once.

The Doctor’s forehead wrinkles and he squints, bringing the picture closer.

This feeling zinging through his chest right now, cold and bare as it is, it punctures his one thumping heart, so it’s leaking. And there isn’t a backup on the other side, just that single muscle throbbing and dribbling down through his chest cavity.

Jealousy.

That’s what this is.

Another emotion to add to the human spectrum he’s got on tap.

And jealousy feels different in this body, different than when he’d been in big ears and blue eyes and Jack Harkness had waltzed his way into Rose’s field of view.

Now, it feels like red burning behind his eyelids when he blinks; it feels like black ink seething in his throat. It’s overwhelming, so he can’t breathe; it’s pulsing through him the same way overwhelming disgust for Davros pulsed through him on the Crucible ship hardly forty-eight hours ago.

“I found some things I think might fit. We’ll have to see whether … oh.”

Rose’s voice snaps him out of … whatever that was he’d slipped into.

She’s standing at the back of the sofa, clothes piled in her hands, staring down at the paper in his lap. He’s crinkling the newspaper edges in his long fingers, crumpling them unconsciously.

“Oh.” Rose clears her throat. “That’s, ah, there was a fundraiser for Pete’s company. Lots of them, actually, fundraisers and benefits and charity events, and I try to go when I can. It means a lot to him and Mum, when I do. The paparazzi here are just as terrible as they were in the other universe. Is that a galaxy-wide thing? Is there a single planet somewhere in the galaxy that  _doesn’t_  have some kind of paparazzi, feeding off the lives of public figures?”

She’s opened the door for the Doctor to launch into a rambling lecture about the planet of Zarappa and its inabitants, who are born with camera-like optical stalks, and who use up bits of their limited biological memory to take photos that are never eraseable, and the highest honor a Zarappan can confer to another living thing is to take a picture of it.

He just shakes his head, looks down at the picture again.

“His name’s – ah – his name’s Timothy. It’s awkward, for me to show up without someone on my arm, it fuels all kinds of sordid stories about my – erm – love life, in the press. And Mickey and Jake finally started turning me down, when I begged them to come along.”

She comes around the couch, taking the paper from his hands and putting clothes in them instead.

[allrightfine](http://allrightfine.tumblr.com/):

He glances at the clothes, jeans and a black t-shirt, and back to the picture, and is suddenly gripped with the idea that these are  _his_  clothes. That Rose has given him  _Timothy’s_  clothes to wear. He feels his stomach lurch at the thought, but can’t help from asking.  
  
"Are these his then?" His voice sounds low even to his own ears and Rose rocks back onto her heels, like he’s done something aggressive, but her tone is level when she answers.  
  
"No, no, the t-shirt’s standard Torchwood issue and the jeans are Jake’s," she says. "He fancies the bartender at the pub down the street and he’s taken to getting pissed and crashing on my sofa, so he started keeping a change over here."  
  
She nods at the jeans again, like maybe the Doctor had forgotten what they were talking about. “He wears them long, so they ought to fit all right. I — uh. I didn’t know about pants.”  
  
That he’s a found himself in a situation where he’s sitting half-naked on Rose Tyler’s furniture while she talks to him about pants and her — what? Her boyfriend? It’s almost too much to handle, and he needs to get away from it.  
  
"My pants should be fine," he says and stands to walk back to the bathroom. "I’ll be out in a minute."  
  
If he lets the towel slip a little down his hips on his way, and if he feels Rose’s eyes follow the movement, well, maybe he’s being unfair, but he’s not the one with a  _Timothy_  in this situation.   
  
~~~~~  
  
Rose watches the Doctor as he walks back down the hall and it’s — she hardly has a word for what it is. The  _Doctor_ , or  _a_  Doctor, in her flat, in a towel, talking about Tim and wearing Jake’s clothes.   
  
It’s surreal and she’s seen an awful lot of realities.   
  
He couldn’t possibly have expected that she’d wait for him alone, all this time? The thought hardly means a thing though, because that’s exactly what she’d tried to do, for a long time. Even after he’d told her it was impossible to come and get her.   
  
Tim had been — there. And nice and handsome. And smart and funny. He was a great bloke and even if she was, at her core, being unfair to him, she’d really tried to give it a proper go. And so there’d been days where not being entirely unhappy had just slipped into being happy, even if it didn’t always last very long.   
  
Leaning down to close the magazine, she settles it on the coffee table before moving toward the kitchen, and the wine.   
  
She’s just poured two glasses, scrounging the last clean ones from the back of cabinets, when the Doctor finds her.  
  
The clothes fit well enough, but she’s fixated on his bare feet, the way he’s curling and uncurling his toes against the tile of her kitchen floor.   
  
She passes him a glass and he takes a long sip, eyes catching hers over the rim.  
  
"I should shower," she says, setting her own glass aside. There’d been just enough left after pouring for her to take one long sip from the bottle to empty it and the taste coats her tongue.  
  
"Yeah," he says, but he doesn’t move from where he’s standing, blocking the doorway.


	2. Chapter 2

“I just wanted to say, what you did was brilliant.” The Doctor’s speaking slowly and deliberately; it’s strange to hear his gob operating at half-speed, as though he’s inspecting each word for defect before he sets it free. “Dimension cannon, hopping between universes, because the stars were going out.” All of this sounds strangely like an apology, with a quiet undercurrent of the same thing he’d had in his voice in the living room, when he was staring at the picture of her holding Tim’s hand in the tabloid.  “You were brilliant, Rose Tyler.”

It occurs to Rose, like a thunderclap, that  _this_  Doctor – he wasn’t in the console room after the regeneration. He didn’t hear her, stuttering and blushing and admitting that she’d poured so much of herself, her waking hours and every last scrap of her energy, into the dimension cannon.

 _This_  Doctor didn’t hear  _why._ Not because of the stars and the darkness in the sky; but because she was desperate to come back to  _him._

 _This_  Doctor has no idea. Because the gap between the Time Lord Doctor and  _this_ Doctor started the minute his regeneration energy was siphoned into the hand in the jar.

“Hallo,” he says, shifting from one bare foot to another — the jeans are too short on him, they stop above his ankles, and it’s distracting – skin and a smattering of brown hair and there are  _freckles_ on his toes, how does that even  _happen_? “You look a bit pale, Rose.”

“If it wasn’t for you,” she says, “there would be a Dalek fleet ravaging the other universe at this very moment. So we’re probably even, on the universe-saving front.”

“Oh.” It’s sudden, that sound. The way his adam’s apple bobs on his long neck, the way his hand drops and his expression drops with it. “Right.”

Rose feels a headache coming on; she feels every grain of sand in her shoes and every particle of void stuff swirling beneath her skin and she’s going to be sick. She needs as scalding hot shower and a good night’s sleep.

Then maybe she can face this Doctor, right here in her flat, barefoot on the kitchen tiles.

Then maybe she can work up the nerve to call Tim, to see him and tell him that the alien she was so hung up on, well, he’s right here in her flat, barefoot on the kitchen tiles.

Tim was never part of Torchwood, never saw the innerworkings of what went on behind those closed doors. He’d tease Rose, sometimes, about how fantastically ridiculous the few bits of information she could tell him actually sounded. In the small quiet hours of the night, after their sweat had dried and they were lying still, and Rose was wondering if she should stay till morning, if she even  _wanted_  to stay – it was like Tim sensed her restlessness.

Because he never wanted her to go, he’d start talking.  _If each decision we make spawns an entirely new universe, then me getting up to go to the loo just now created a whole other realm of existence. Does Torchwood have a department to study that, the universe-creating qualities of piss?_

Most times, Tim knew how to make her laugh, knew the right words to distract her. So occasionally, she’d stay. But there were boundaries he learned not to cross, when it came to that teasing.  _Your alien bloke, he must be a mind-blowing shag, if you’re making this cannon to get back to him._

Rose was out the door in two minutes flat, lips pressed tightly together, not listening to a word of Tim’s apology. Later she’d admitted to herself that his comment hadn’t been mean-spirited; it was a thin veil of humor over an earnest, inappropriate question. But that night she walked for seventeen blocks in the dark looking for a cab, her knickers in her trouser pocket and her shirt buttons crooked. She didn’t talk to him for weeks afterward. And Tim never, ever mentioned  _your alien bloke_ again.

Rose stares up into the face of  _her alien bloke,_ at his warm brown eyes and the way he’s thumbing his ear in the now uncomfortable silence.

[allrightfine](http://allrightfine.tumblr.com/):

There’s another knock on the door and she jumps slightly with the sound, but the Doctor doesn’t seem to have even noticed, he’s still focused on Rose, long fingers wrapped around his wine glass.

“That’d be the food,” she says, and hopes it true.

She brushes past him on her way out of the kitchen, and she can smell her shower stuff on him, the slight citrus of her shower gel, the vaguely fruity scent of her shampoo.

He doesn’t smell much like himself at all and she wonders if he ever will again, or if that was a product of the TARDIS, of the other universe, of all the things lost to them now.

She opens the door to the delivery man, feeling herself relax. She hadn’t actually thought it would be Tim, but it wasn’t a complete impossibility. Not that those seem to mean much in her life anyway.

It’s just a pizza, and she should’ve ordered from something closer, but it was sort of a routine now, home from a Torchwood mission, pizza from that place that uses the little pepperonis. Of course, it’s usually Mickey and Jake in her kitchen, but she’d placed the call without thinking.

The Doctor steps up behind her as she moves to pay and takes the pizza from the delivery guy, shuffling back toward the kitchen with it.

When she joins him a few minutes later, he’s found two paper plates from somewhere in the pantry’s takeaway reserves and put a couple slices on each.

There are pieces missing from the pizza in a seemingly random order, but when she looks at her plate, she sees all her slices have those big, doughy bubbles near the crust, the ones she loves. She smiles at him gratefully and he returns it, reaching out to poke one of the bubbles with his finger.

“You’re losing valuable pizza real estate with those, you know,” he says.

“I prefer to think of it as gaining valuable bubble real estate,” she says and reaches for a slice, catching a glimpse of her fingernails with the movement. There’s a dark line of sand under some of them and she should really clean up before she eats.

“I should — I need to take a shower,” she says. “You can eat if you want. You should eat.”

He gives her a nod that she takes to mean he’ll be doing nothing of the sort and she leaves for her bedroom.

Her mobile is vibrating on the side table again and she glances down to see another text message from Tim — “Knock, knock.”

She can’t avoid him forever, especially if Henry  _had_  texted him, so she types out, “Who’s there?” and sets to stripping down for her shower. If he calls, she’s not going to answer, but a text seems harmless enough and she’s got to at least  _try_  and be fair.

His response chimes just as she’s turning the taps on.

“Orange.”

She pulls down a towel with one hand, thumbing out, “Orange who?” with the other.

“Orange you glad you wrote back? I am, because now I know you’re alive.”

She sets aside the mobile aside and steps into the shower.

[gallifreyburning](http://gallifreyburning.tumblr.com/):

~~~~~

The Doctor doesn’t know exactly when he fell asleep – it hasn’t happened to him in longer than he can remember, falling asleep without intending to. Certainly not in at least the last five bodies, never in a body this young. He can go without sleep for days, sometimes weeks at a time – at least, he  _used_ to be able to.

He remembers eating a half a piece of pizza and drinking a glass of wine, sitting on the couch and most decidedly  _not_ looking at the tabloid or wondering whether there were any more pictures of Rose holding anybody else’s hand on the other pages. And by the time the glass was empty, his fingertips and toes felt incredibly heavy, and he’d stretched out on the admittedly short couch, and his eyes must have slipped closed.

When he wakes up, there’s drool on the wool pillow under his head. The windows are dark, the street outside is quiet, and there’s a blanket covering him. Which means that, at some point, Rose must’ve put it there.

He’s still for a minute, because this blanket – it smells like her. The scent is so familiar, something he’s missed for so long, something that sends hormones trickling through this new half-human body. It’s the same scent he remembers, lying curled together in an armchair on his TARDIS and watching telly, grabbing her and yanking her away from a werewolf, picking her up and swinging her back and forth after they’d both faced down an alien claiming to be Satan.

He hops up, silently pads to the door that leads to the bedroom. There’s a Rose-shaped pile of duvet in the middle of the bed, and she is most decidedly asleep. Quietly as he can, the Doctor puts on his red trainers and walks out the front door. Because Canary Wharf is nearby, and he’s done sleeping, and he needs to see the stars and get some air.

Rose is Rose, but she isn’t – not the girl he met in the basement at Henriks, not the woman who risked life and limb to make sure the Earth was safe from Cybermen and Daleks alike. She’s changed in these last four years. Become quieter, more determined, harder.

On the beach the first time, when he was a holographic projection, he’d told her she was embarking on the one adventure he could never have – day after day. And he’d wanted her to find happiness, hadn’t he? To not be lonely. To be fantastic, to live to a ripe old age and look back on her life and not feel regret for a single decision she’d made.

So Rose found someone else’s hand to hold.

Fair enough, so had he.

Maybe that kiss on the beach, it didn’t mean what the Doctor thought it did.

And maybe Rose still wanted to hold this other bloke’s hand. The Doctor would never have sent Donna or Martha away, just because Rose came back to the TARDIS. ( _Although really, Timothy? Rubbish name. Rubbish name, rubbish ridiculous orange trainers, rubbish blond hair. Rose at least deserves someone who has a decent name and a decent sense of style, she does, but it’s her choice, always it has to be her choice._ )

The Doctor looks up, realizes he’s standing in front of the Torchwood building at Canary Wharf. Realizes the sky has gone from navy to grey, and it’s his second sunrise in this new universe, this new life. Takes a deep breath and walks back to Rose’s flat.

[allrightfine](http://allrightfine.tumblr.com/):

Rose is up when he gets back, he can tell from the muffled noise on the other side of the door, which is just as well, because he’d taken care to lock the door before he closed it when he left, and now he’s stuck without a way back in.

There’s a sonic in his suit jacket, but it’s an old model, from bodies ago, and there had to have been a reason he retired it, even if he can’t remember it now, so it’s likely it doesn’t work properly. It’d been an impulse grab, nicking it from a bin of spare parts while his other self was saying his farewells to Sarah Jane, and anyway, his jacket is inside, with Rose.

He knocks lightly on the door, self-consciously running a hand through his hair as he hears her footsteps grow louder.

She unlocks the door and opens it and he’s struck with an overwhelming urge to hug her, take her hand, something, anything. When she steps aside to let him in, he can’t fight it anymore and he sweeps her up into a hug.

There, that’s nice and vague, they’ve hugged plenty of time before, people hug their mums, their dogs, it doesn’t have to mean anything beyond just being happy the person you’re hugging exists.

Rose’s arms wrap around him reflexively, he feels her shift her hand to nudge the door shut, and then her fingers are curling into the fabric of his t-shirt.

They stand like that for a few moments, just inside her flat, the first rays of sunlight streaming through the window blinds and he lets himself have this, at least this, even if he can’t take it any further.

She turns her head so that her face is buried in his neck and clutches at him tighter, pulling herself up onto her toes. He feels her lips graze the skin under his jaw, and it could have been an accident, a product of the way she’s nuzzling into him, but it makes him freeze up anyway.

He pulls back to look at her face and it’s a complete mystery, he’s got no idea what she’s thinking and the way her expression clouds over and then clears, it’s seems like he’s not the only one out of his depth.

“You’re up early,” he says, letting his arms fall away and following Rose further into the flat.

“Force of habit, early morning debriefs the day after a mission are a Torchwood favorite,” she says and he tries not to let his disappointment show. Of course she has somewhere to be, he’ll just, well, what? Watch Eastenders? Come along?

She leads him into the kitchen, checking cupboards like she expects them to look any different than they did last night.

“I’ll skip it,” she says and relief floods his veins. “Let’s go get some breakfast.”

They’ve said fewer words to each other in the last 24 hours than it usually takes them to settle on a movie to watch and he doesn’t want to push it exactly, but he wants some sort of release valve for all this tension between them.

“Breakfast sounds brilliant,” he says. “I’d say I know just the place, but I noticed on the walk back that it appears to be a dry cleaners in this universe and unless you fancy a tall cup of tetrachloroethylene for the first meal of the day, we’d better let you pick.”

[gallifreyburning](http://gallifreyburning.tumblr.com/):

~~~~~

The Doctor’s holding a paper bag full of pastries, and Rose is holding a steaming to-go mug of tea as they walk together across the patch of green at Canada Square Park.

It’s surreal, being here in London, still in  _this_ London, with zeppelins overhead. It’s surreal, not feeling the incessant urge to get back to the lab, to try  _one more time._ It’s surreal, catching sight of him out of the corner of her eye and turning to look, and instead of being hit by a wave of disappointment when she realizes it’s just a skinny bloke with brown hair and a suit (so many years of that feeling, that disappointment, it’s almost second nature to her now); she’s hit by a wave of exhilaration, because now it’s  _him,_ it  _is_ the Doctor.

Well, Rose is fairly certain it’s the Doctor, anyway. She watches him as he plops down in the shade of a tree, stretching his long legs out straight, digging into the pastry bag with gusto. He seems to be functioning properly for the Doctor, hasn’t shut up for the last half hour, babbling on about alien planets and things she remembers so clearly – running for their lives from wheeled spore-spewing plants across a salt flat on an orange moon, squabbling over who swam the fastest lap in the TARDIS swimming pool, him agreeing to let her put barrettes in his hair and her taking a picture, which led to the most aggressive game of chase they’d played to date, through nearly every single corridor of the TARDIS, until he’d cornered her in a dusty, disused bowling alley and tickled her until she handed over the camera, which he promptly used to bowl a strike. The picture was never seen again.

She sits down with him, takes a sip of tea and hands it over so he can have a taste. He takes the cup, fingers wrapping around the heat-resistant sleeve, and brings the cup to his mouth. He’s looking at her without looking at her, always tracking and aware even when his eyes are focused on something else.

Like right now, how he’s staring at the big, empty silver stage at the opposite end of the park.

He clears his throat. “Listen, Rose, that thing I said. On the … on the beach.” Clears his throat again, tips his head to the side, as though he’s trying to spot an ant onstage. “Just because I said … well-l-l-l, it doesn’t mean things have to be different. Between us. All that ‘one life’ stuff, it’s just” – he clears his throat again, sits forward suddenly, away from her – “it’s just that I want us to be  _us._ The Doctor and Rose, just like things were. Doesn’t have to be anything more than that.”

He finally looks at her, the creases around his eyes deepening as he reaches up to scratch the back of his head. She knows that gesture; it’s something he does when he’s uncomfortable. “And I reckon if you like this Timothy bloke, then I’ll like him too. Just so long as he’s … what you want. If he’s what you want, and he makes you happy, then I’m certain I’ll like him.”

Rose stares back at the Doctor in astonishment. There are blades of grass tickling the backs of her knees, and she doesn’t know why she chose to wear a dress – not jeans and a hoodie like she used to wear with the Doctor, not black trousers and a leather jacket like she’s worn every day since she landed in this universe, but something soft, something different and new for today. She wishes, for an instant, that she  _did_ have her leather jacket, because she feels bulletproof in that old blue thing. And right now, it’s like her beating heart is exposed to the air, fluttering and electric and surrounded by dancing motes of dust.

[allrightfine](http://allrightfine.tumblr.com/):

She forces herself to speak, to just open her mouth and let words spill out without thinking.

“You’re what I want, Doctor,” she says, surprising herself with the conviction in her voice. “You’re always what I want, but I had to learn to want other things, too, things that were still in the same universe as me.”

The Doctor looks like he wants to answer her, fingers pulling at the blades of grass with the force of keeping quiet, and she doesn’t know how much longer he’ll manage, so she keeps going.

“And you will like Tim, not just because I do, but because he’s a good bloke,” she says. “A good bloke that deserves more than I could give him, we weren’t, it wasn’t, we didn’t name it, you know? But I think I was his girlfriend, more than I wasn’t. I think I  _am_ , and I owe him an explanation, I think I ought to talk to him before — I think I ought to talk to him first.”

What comes second, what’s going to come  _after_ , with the Doctor, it’s another thing she can’t name, and it hangs in the air so thickly that she feels like she can almost see it.

“So, we’ll finish our breakfast, get you some clothes that don’t indicate an incoming flood, and then I’ll drop you at my mum’s — she’s missed you, too, even if she wouldn’t admit it — just for a bit, so I can, I don’t know, start to sort things with Tim. All right?”

The Doctor nods, eyes wide, and she can tell he’s trying to slot the woman that just proved she could match his gob with the woman, the girl, he used to travel with.

She’s worried he’s going to come up short.

They finish their breakfast in relative silence, watching people cross the park, coming and going, lives marching on even if Rose feels like her own is hanging in stasis.

The shops are just opening as they make their way back out onto the streets and the Doctor doesn’t put up a fuss as she leads him through the doors of a department store.

He gravitates toward the suits, but surprises her by stopping off for jeans and jumpers, too. She’s feeling more than a little guilty, about Tim, about the Doctor, about everything, and in an awkward gesture of comfort, she grabs a pair of jeans and t-shirt for herself.

Maybe they both need to feel a little bit like their old selves, just for now.

The Doctor dutifully tries on the outfits, exiting the fitting room each time to meet with her approval. The suits will all need to be tailored, but he finds a pair of brown trousers that fit well enough, pairing them with a blue button down and a pair of off-white Converse for the outfit he’s going to wear out of the shop.

He gestures at the jeans and shirt in her hands, “Aren’t you going to try yours on?”

She wasn’t planning on it, but she shrugs and makes her way into the stall he’d vacated. The look he gives her when she steps out of the fitting room, the funny feeling in her chest like she’d get after a visit to the wardrobe, it’s enough that she decides to keep it on, and the Doctor helps her snip the tags to take to the register, fingers brushing against her skin in a way she forces herself to ignore.

They’re back on the street within an hour, laden down with bags, and she flags down a taxi to take them to her parents’.

As the cab follows the drive up to the mansion, she’s already planning out her next moves, fingers scratching absent patterns on the fabric of her jeans. Drop the Doctor off, show him the kitchen, and her old workshop, and then borrow a car to take to Tim’s.

It’s only when the cab’s pulling to a stop in front of the door that she realizes that’s not going to be necessary, there’s already an extra car in the drive, and it belongs to Tim.

[gallifreyburning](http://gallifreyburning.tumblr.com/):

The cab comes to a stop, brakes whining. Rose sits utterly still, staring at the green Mercedes in front of them, thinking about the man it belongs to, the man waiting inside. She leans forward to the acrylic partition between them and the cabbie, says a quiet word, and the cabbie nods. The cabbie lets the meter run, and Rose closes the little window in the partition, so they aren’t overheard.

“Pete introduced us,” Rose says. The Doctor, who had been gathering shopping bags from around his feet and reaching for the door latch, stops. Watches her. She doesn’t look at him, not yet. She’s not entirely sure why she’s saying this aloud; it’s not as if she has to prove anything to the Doctor.

“Tim’s the son of one of Pete’s old school mates. He, ah” – her fingers flex, ball into a fist, unclench – “he lost his wife and son in a car wreck, just over a year ago. My mum found out, found out that six months later Tim was still in the thick of it emotionally, and she thought maybe we had something in common. Losing someone. The grief, and all of that. Thought maybe I could help him or something. I’m good at that, helping people.” She looks at the Doctor. “Making them better.”

A soft clicking noise comes from the back of the Doctor’s throat, and he manages a strained, “Oh.”

 “There was a terrible and awkward dinner here at the house with Pete and Mum. I don’t know what they were expecting. Tim was nice enough, but he was still hung up on his wife. And honestly, I was in worse shape than Tim – three and a half years on, and still completely …” Rose lets out a shaky breath, her gaze dropping as she tries to swallow the warm wad of emotion welling in her throat.

“A few weeks after that dinner, Torchwood cut funding for the dimension cannon. Shut it down completely. Reassigned me as an agent instead of a specialist, put me on regular cases.” She swallows again, because that ball of heat is just getting bigger, cutting off her air. “I pleaded with the Director. Yelled. Lied. Used every connection I had. Then I ate my pride and came to Pete, asked him to fund the cannon privately, to buy the tech from Torchwood and let me develop it on my own.”

Her fingers are fluttering on her lap, and she doesn’t notice him moving, but she feels the Doctor’s hand slip around her own. Grasp tightly, warmer than she’s used to, but familiar enough. She squeezes back.

“Mum and Pete sat me down, told me that it was time to let go. That I shouldn’t waste my life, that even you would want me to move on. I thought about that for a long time, about what you might’ve wanted for me. About what  _I_ wanted.

“One day after work Jake dragged me to this new pub – the bartender he fancies, the beginning of that thing, with Jake crashing at my place and keeping a spare change of clothes – yeah, we went to this pub, and Tim was there. Because the firm where he works is just around the corner. While Jake was hitting it off with the bartender, Tim and I started talking, and we realized that we were both so very … lonely.”

“That was five months ago. It was only two months ago that the stars started disappearing, going out. All the higher-ups at Torchwood were panicked, desperate to figure out what was going on, and they finally listened when I told them we should try the cannon again. And it worked.”

“Honestly, I think I was more surprised than anyone, about that dimension cannon.” Rose scratches her cheek, can’t feel her own fingernails on her skin.  ”I should’ve broken things off with Tim then, should’ve let it go. Because the jumps, they weren’t always – safe.” She forces herself to meet the Doctor’s eyes. “There are universes between this one and ours that … don’t bear thinking about.”

He looks like he’s hovering on the edge, like he might try to take her into his arms, hug her, hold her, and she isn’t quite ready for that. So she forces the corners of her mouth up just enough to ease the rawness of her words, to keep him in check. “It wasn’t fair. Not for either of us. But I was being so strong, in everything else – leading, guiding, driving, doing the dimension jumps – this was the one thing I couldn’t be strong in. Honestly, I didn’t know how.”

[allrightfine](http://allrightfine.tumblr.com/):

~~~~~

The Doctor’s entire body feels hot and prickling and out of his control. There’s a rushing in his ears, his mouth is dry and if he doesn’t touch Rose, doesn’t at least hold her hand, he’s going to — well, he doesn’t know exactly, but he can’t imagine it will be pretty. Or healthy.

What has he done to her? All this talk about needing to be strong, and being lonely, and, oh, the shape she was apparently still in three and a half years later. Not that he was in much better shape, but part of what had helped him, what he _did_  want for her, it was always a fantastic life.

He stuffs down the tiny, ugly part of him that feels pleased that she hadn’t found it with Tim, not the forever sort of fantastic, at least.

Rose is watching him carefully, shoulders beginning to slump under the weight of what she’s said, or the weight of the last several years.

He’s still itching to touch her, to let her lean on him in the metaphorical  _and_  physical sense, but she’s holding herself in a way that he can’t tell if it would be welcome or just make things worse. He settles for inching his hand toward her, pinky finger edging along the outside seam of her jeans.

She covers his hand with hers and he flips his own upward, so he can knit their fingers together, squeezing briefly before he begins to speak.

"I’ll wait," he says. "In this cab, or in the foyer, or back at your flat. I’ll wait."

He hopes she knows he means that in the larger sense, too, that he’ll wait as long as it takes, because the last thing he wants from this one shot he has with her now is to bollocks it up right at the start.

She gives him a smile that feels more like a sigh and lets go of his hand to reach for the door handle, twisting it open.

"Let’s just see how it goes," she says, and steps from the cab.

He follows her out, standing in the sunlight on the Tyler driveway, and they make their way to the door.

Rose uses a key instead of knocking and the entryway is quiet for a moment before Jackie’s voice echoes down the stairs.

"Rose, is that you? I’ll be down in a bit!" Jackie pauses, voice somehow quieter even though she’s yelling, "Tim’s here."

He follows Rose through the house and nearly collides into her as she stops suddenly in the living room.

There, on the carpeting, playing trucks with Tony Tyler, is Tim.

His eyes go wide at the sight of her, and then shift to the Doctor, fingers dropping the small yellow car he’s holding to the ground.

"Hello," he says, just as Tony sees her, pushing up from the ground to barrel into Rose’s legs.

Rose picks Tony up for a quick cuddle, “Tony, you remember the Doctor,” then she turns to Tim, “Tim, this is the Doctor. Doctor, this is Tim.”

Tim unfolds his legs, long and skinny, and oh, Rose Tyler, you do have a type, don’t you? And then he’s standing in front of the Doctor, hand extended.

"Nice to meet you, Doctor," Tim says.

The Doctor shakes his hand, floundering for the appropriate response, settling for returning the greeting and adding, “I’ve heard a lot about you,” in a rush of words at the end.

Tim looks — pleased? Surprised? It’s hard to say, but his lips curl up into a small smile, teeth straight and white just peeking through.

Rose’s attention shifts back to Tony, “Tony, I need to speak to Tim, can you play trucks with the Doctor for a bit?”

Tony nods and shifts from Rose’s arms, dropping back to the ground.

Tim stoops down to speak to him, “I’ll be back,” and he makes a fist with his hand, holding it up to Tony. Tony makes a fist in return and they push them together.

"T and T,  _kaboom_!” They say, fists uncurling  and fingers waving and somehow this is more telling than anything the Doctor’s heard yet. Tim is a part of Rose’s day to day life, her family life, in a way he’s only dreamt of, for years now.

Rose leads Tim from the living room and the Doctor can just hear their conversation trailing off.

"You’re wearing jeans," Tim says. "I didn’t think you even owned jeans."

Rose’s voice seems tight when she says, “I did. I  _do_.”


	3. Chapter 3

Head and stomach churning, the Doctor sits down next to the blond boy on the floor, picks up one of the toy trucks and flips it over, inspecting the undercarriage. “Mmm. Simple retraction velocity mechanism, I presume?”

Head tipping sideways, Tony stares at the Doctor as if he’s spouting out random sounds that bear no resemblance to human speech. The Doctor blinks, does a quick mental check of the last few seconds to make sure he was speaking English and hadn’t slipped into Gallifreyan or Farsi or Elvish. Realizing he was indeed speaking the Queen’s own, he lifts his eyebrows at the boy expectantly.

Tony says, “Mum always said you never made any sense.”

“Your mum said that, did she? Ohhhh, well, sense is overrated,” the Doctor tells him with a grin and a wink. “Especially as far as dealing with Jackie Tyler is concerned. We can improve the speed and power of these things with just a few little tweaks, have them crossing the length of the house in one go. Do you happen to know where your parents keep the tools?”

Tony’s eyes brighten at that. “Da’s got a box in the garage!”

Popping to his feet, lifting Tony up and bouncing him before setting him back down, the Doctor says, “Lead on, my good man!”

~~~~~

Rose is closing the doors to the parlor, with her back to the room, and when she turns around Tim is right there. Close, tall and familiar and her source of comfort for the last half a year.

“I know,” he says, his arms slipping around her, pulling her against him. “I know what’s coming, what’s happening, and just – just let me have this, just for a second. Before it all starts. Please?”

It’s like a reflex, relaxing into Tim’s embrace, her arms slipping around his back and hands spreading against his shoulderblades as she presses her cheek to his chest. He smells like aftershave and his shirt still carries the faint hint of his detergent that she knows so well from the sheets on his bed. There’s no subtle alien nuance to his scent, nothing unusual. So very, very human.

“I’m sorry,” she says, and the words are strained, broken. Trip on the way out of her mouth.

“Do you think, if Sarah somehow miraculously showed up on my doorstep, back from the dead, that I would be able to turn her away? To say no? Don’t be sorry.”

Rose has to get some distance, because the warmth of his body and the sound of his voice rumbling through his chest are like shards of glass, poking at her. Reminders of the fact that what’s happening – it isn’t fair to anyone, really. Clearing her throat, using her cuff to wipe at the hot moisture building in her eyes, she steps away from him. “C’mon, let’s sit down.”

She perches on one end of the couch, Tim settles on the other. Normally he’d throw his arm along the back of it, stretch out, sprawl. Now, he sits with his legs together, his arms crossed over his chest, and his shoulders hunched.

“I’m glad you’re okay. I wondered, when the stars came back and I didn’t hear from you for a couple of days – thought that maybe something had gone wrong, even though you achieved your – what do they call it? Mission objective? The brass at Torchwood weren’t very forthcoming in the information department, and when I called Pete, he was very cryptic about everything.” Tim’s eyes dart toward the door, toward the Doctor beyond it, in the other end of the house.

She smiles, a small stretching of her lips. “Yeah, managed to muddle through with only a few bruises. Destroyed a good bit of Torchwood tech, though. The paperwork on that’s going to kill me.”

“And your alien bloke, the one so intent on saving that other universe over there, that other Earth. He came back to this one, just for you.” It’s a statement and a question, all at the same time.

Rose’s gaze falls to her hands in her lap, to where she’s picking at her cuticles.

[allrightfine](http://allrightfine.tumblr.com/):

“It’s…complicated,” she says, and it’s such a drastic understatement that she almost laughs.

“Oh, is he not staying then?” The hope running barely restrained through Tim’s voice tugs at something in her chest, stretching it wide and painful.

“No,” she says. “I mean yes, I mean — no, he’s not not leaving, yes, he’s staying.”

Tim nods, a tight little movement she almost can’t see.

“And so that other universe is, what? On its own?” It’s a little bit off-topic, and probably not actually the thing he really cares about, but she answers him anyway.

“There’s a Doctor there now, too,” and there’s a delay, a beat where he’s just another Doctor, not  _the_  Doctor, not the  _Time Lord_  Doctor, just  _a_  Doctor, same as the one with her. She wonders at her brain, buzzing along, working through all that on its own, almost without her permission.

“And which one is the one you love?” There’s a jam stain in almost the exact shape of Tony’s hand on the fabric of Tim’s jeans and he traces it with his fingers before looking up at her. “Or is it both of them?”

Rose clenches her jaw, catching the side of tongue her between her teeth inside her mouth and biting down just hard enough to give her something else to focus on. Because it  _is_  both of them, and she’s off to an inauspicious start with one, and the other left without saying goodbye and she’ll never see him again.

“It’s both of them,” she finally says. “This one here though, he’s here for good. Not so much ‘my alien bloke’ anymore as my half-human one.  _A_  half-human one.”

Tim tips his head back against the sofa, staring at the ceiling, eyes tracking the blades of the fan as it spins slowly.

“How did that happen?”

Rose feels a corner of her mouth lift, Tim is smart, incredibly smart, but she’s not sure he’ll understand about regeneration energy and metacrises and, anyway, she wouldn’t do a good job of explaining it. She lets her mind wander to a time when the Doctor could explain it to him, and the picture of it is so fuzzy, that she knows it’s not a very probable future.

“Alien stuff,” she says and smiles fully this time, because Tim’s used to that answer, used to asking her what she did at work that day and laughing when she tells him “alien stuff.”

Tim smiles, too, but it’s a sad thing, one that gnaws at her gut.

“Well, Miss Tyler, it’s been an absolute pleasure,” he says and runs his palms down the thighs of his jeans, like he’s readying to stand.

“You, too, Tim,” it’s not fair, what she does next, but she leans over and kisses him softly on the cheek.

He does stand after that, and she follows, accidentally catching the toe of his trainer with her own.

“Oi, these are meant to be kept in pristine condition,” he says.

It’s not exactly a hugging, tearful acceptance, but then, they were never about that.

“Henry got some new ones, purple, I think they were,” Rose says. “He told me to tell you about them, not even supposed to be out yet.”

Tim licks at his thumb, bending down to swipe at the nonexistent spot on his shoe.

“Lucky bastard,” he says when he stands again and it’s clear he’s not talking about Henry.

[gallifreyburning](http://gallifreyburning.tumblr.com/):

Rose doesn’t even have the parlor door open before the sound of shattering glass fills the house. She’s off like a shot, dashing through the marble foyer, across the living room, toward Pete’s home office, and the sense of urgency is all instinct, but different  _kinds_ of instinct. Part of her is still in dimension jump mode, attuned to everything around her, ready and waiting for every situation to go to hell, ready and waiting to deal with the ( _often literally_ ) bloody aftermath. The other part of her has been dormant for years, now slowly reawakening; the  _what trouble has the Doctor gotten himself into now,_ damage control instinct.

Coming from the other end of the house, the Doctor and Tony arrive at the same time Rose does and they all peer into the office.

“Blimey, did you see the speed off of that one? The green truck’s  _definitely_ got at advantage, with its wider wheel base. Do you suppose that means the orange ambulance will go fastest?” the Doctor says to Tony, grinning like a maniac.

“Faster than  _that_?” Tony responds in wonder, staring with big eyes at the shattered crystal vase on the floor next to the bookshelf. “But the green truck went so fast it was flying!”

“What the  _hell_ is going on here?”

Jackie’s voice makes them all jump, and Tony slips behind Rose’s legs, his little hands gripping her thighs like she’s a shield.

“Bit of a – ah – bit of a malfunction with the green truck, I’m afraid. The retraction mechanism didn’t respond quite as I was expecting to the recalibration, and –”

“David and Geri Beckham gave us that crystal vase as a wedding gift!” Jackie says, hands on her hips.

“Ugliest gift we got, by far.” Pete strolls into the room behind Jackie, shaking his head. “Always hated that thing. Now I have room on that shelf for my collection of signed cricket balls.” He gives Rose a hug, extends a hand to the Doctor for a shake. “I hope you’re all hungry, I’ve got the grill fired up and we’re having barbecue for dinner.”

Rose suddenly notices that there are only five of them in the room, that Tim is nowhere to be seen. He slipped out sometime during the hubbub, probably didn’t even follow her past the foyer. Just stepped out the front door, silent as a ghost.

She’s probably never going to see him again.

“Those breakfast pastries are long gone,” the Doctor says, patting his stomach. “I could do with a bit of barbecue.” He glances at Rose sideways, takes in her expression, and his fingers slip between hers, hand holding hers tight. She squeezes back.

It hurts, right now. A bittersweet ache. But it’s going to get better. And Tim’s always been strong; he’s going to be okay, too.

“Oh no you don’t,” Jackie retorts. “No barbecue for you, Doctor, until you clean up this mess!”

Tony is tugging on the Doctor’s trousers, and the Doctor looks down at him. “You clean up the mess like Mum says, I’ll get the orange ambulance and the screwdriver,” he says in a loud little-boy whisper.

“Good man,” the Doctor whispers in reply.

[allrightfine](http://allrightfine.tumblr.com/):

~~~~~

He’s not sure  _exactly_  how to go about cleaning up a broken vase. It seems like the sort of thing he’d leave to someone else, or his ship, or, well, just abandon entirely. But Rose says something about going for a dustpan, everyone else troops from the room, and then suddenly he’s left alone with a mess of broken crystal.

He collects a few larger pieces in his palm, sweeping the smaller bits into a pile with his shoe and he’s so focused on the way the sunlight streaming in through the windows is catching the shards, throwing rainbows throughout the room, that he doesn’t hear Rose return.

“Got a broom,” she says and her voice, one he’s still not used to hearing in real life again, makes him jump.

His hand closes around the shards he’s collected, and there’s the sharp slice of pain as one cuts into his skin.

He yelps at the feeling, hand uncurling to drop the pieces to the ground as Rose turns to look at him.

There’s blood flowing in a steady stream from the wound, and he watches in fascination as it collects in the lines of his palm, pooling and dripping to the floor.

Rose lets go of a muffled noise he can’t quite make out and then she’s clutching at his hand, her face pale and her lips drawn tight.

“What did you do?” She says, but she’s already examining the cut, small fingers clearing the last of the crystal from his skin. “You’re bleeding.”

His hand is pulsing steadily, like he can feel the blood flowing to it, flowing out of it, but he’s more worried about Rose and the tight grip she has on his hand, the way she looks as if she herself is in pain.

“It’ll be all right, clean it up, get a plaster, back in tip-top shape,” he says. “Might even get a scar out of it — that’ll be novel! Never had a scar before.”

He’s almost fascinated by the blood,  _human_  blood, dripping out of  _his_  body, he can smell the copper of it, feel the endorphins and adrenaline, all of it rushing through him. There’s cells and platelets, things to clot the wound and it’s racing in his veins and he can tell, in some detached Time Lord part of his brain, that two millimeters deeper and he’d have needed stitches.

“And you don’t need any scars now!” Rose’s voice is raised and she drops his hand, wheeling on him and no longer pale, instead her cheeks are flushed, eyes flashing with anger. “Barely been here a day and you’re already getting hurt!”

This probably isn’t  _entirely_  about him, but it is in part, at least, and she’s kept such a tight hold on everything that it’s a wonder it didn’t boil over sooner.

“I’m sorry,” he says and cups his hands together so the blood stops falling to the floor. “Loo?”

Rose’s brow is still furrowed, her shoulders held tense, but she guides him to the bathroom, turning on the tap and pointing at it.

He winces as the water hits the cut, blooding lightening to pink as it swirls down the basin, and he sees Rose visibly shake her head. Her voice softens as she says, “Here, let me,” and then she’s got his hand again, fingers gentle and grip firm.

[gallifreyburning](http://gallifreyburning.tumblr.com/):

Rose runs her fingertips along his palm, working the blood out of the creases and making sure there’s no more shards hiding there. Then she turns off the tap, grabs several tissues and wads them up. Folds them into his hand, wraps his fingers around them and squeezes to stanch the bleeding.

There are two primary things the Doctor notices about this entire process of events: first, Rose’s hands are calloused, and they weren’t before he lost her at Canary Wharf. Not in this way. He’d held them often, and he has a particularly clear recollection of what Rose Tyler’s hands felt like then, the clear recollection of someone with enormous brain capacity whose attention to detail can be quite precise, when he’s interested in something.

He has  _always_ been interested in Rose Tyler.

Second, he notices that his own skin is remarkably sensitive. Maybe it’s because he’s only been in this new body for a few days, and there’s a tiny remnant of regeneration energy buzzing in his marrow ( _the last time he’ll ever feel that sensation, actually_ ). Maybe it’s because now he’s got human nerve-endings mixed in with the Time Lord ones. But he can feel the soft puff of Rose’s breath on his wet skin when she sighs, the warm curl of her fingers across his own, the way the air around her shifts when she lets go and steps away.

Rose is hurting. He sees it plain as day across her face, in her posture. She’s hurting, maybe because she felt more for Tim than affection (he squelches the tiny spark of jealousy that flickers in his head; squelches it because she’s here with him, not the other bloke); maybe because she hurt a good man, by making the choice (and isn’t that just like his Rose, always so attuned to others’ feelings, always conscious of how they’ve been affected); maybe it’s because she’s been fighting a battle for four years, and the battle is over.

Rose shifts from one foot to the other, brings her right hand to her mouth and nibbles on her cuticles. “Just a few minutes’ pressure should do the trick,” she says. And the Doctor realizes she’s flustered, on top of everything else – at the sight of blood?

“Thanks.”

Her eyes meet his. “’Course. You go around bleeding very often, though, and I’m going to murder you.”

Bringing his uninjured hand to his forehead, he gives her a mock salute. “Aye-aye, Miss Tyler.”

She swats his hand down, a smile ghosting around the edges of her mouth. “Oi, no salutes!”

Dinner at the Tyler mansion is more enjoyable than the Doctor would have imagined. The fact that Tony’s around livens things up considerably; he brings his toy cars to the back yard, and the Doctor shows him how to tinker with the retraction velocity mechanism on the orange ambulance until it ends up lost over the fence at the very far end of the enormous lawn. And as all five of them sit down on the patio to eat, talking and laughing, the Doctor feels something he hasn’t in a long time – shades of the warm sense of belonging he’d begun to have during the Christmas of the Sycorax invasion. Mickey’s gone, but Pete and Tony are here, and this is … something the Doctor’s been missing for so long, he forgot how good it could feel.

On the way home, they stop at Tesco, because Rose insists the cupboards at her flat are bare. Which is a gross overstatement; the Doctor clearly remembers three Pot Noodles, a half-used jar of dried rosemary, a bottle of beer, and a molded container of Chinese food in her kitchen, but he doesn’t think this is quite the time to bring up the validity of her assertion.

They wander together down aisles of dairy and bread, Rose pushing a wheeled basket and asking his opinion about whether they should get whole or two percent milk.

The Doctor thinks about milk-producing trees on Arborea Prime, about how the sap is effervescent and how it pops and fizzes on your tongue and releases different flavors depending on the season and UV intensity of the sun. Thinks about how he’s never going to see Arborea Prime again. Stares at Rose, at the sweep of her blond hair across her forehead and the way her fingernails have gone white, gripping waxed cartons; at the glitter of fluorescent light in her honey-colored eyes and the tiny crease between her eyebrows as she stares back at him.

There are entire universes inside of this woman, he thinks. Unexplored horizons, new worlds, all of it fizzing and popping and she’s standing on these linoleum tiles in her new jeans, asking him about milk because she cares what he thinks; she wants him to be happy.

“Two percent,” he says.

Rose leaves him for a minute, says something about feminine products. “Do you need help choosing those, too?” he asks, bright and enthusiastic.

Tongue touching her top lip, grin lifting the corners of her mouth, she says, “I think I have this one under control, thanks. Pick us out some cold cereal, I’ll be right back.”

There are shelves upon shelves of choices, box after box, bright cartoon characters and specious claims about nutritious vitamins and minerals, and the Doctor stares at them all. Walks up and down four or five times, and when he looks up, he discovers Rose is standing at the end of the aisle, staring at him. How long has she been there?

He lifts his hands, a different box in each. “There’s the one with a leprechaun on it, but the proportions are all wrong, his skin is pink instead of green, the hat’s something no  _real_ leprechaun would ever be caught dead in. But it’s got  _marshmallows_ in it, Rose – _marshmallows_ in all different exciting colors for breakfast, what will they think of next! The human race is a wonder! And then there’s this one, just plain little O’s, but it looks a bit boring.”

“Why don’t you just get Weetabix? You love Weetabix.”

He shrugs, lifts his eyebrows. “New-ish man. New-ish taste buds. Time to try new-ish things.”

She takes a few long strides right at him, and it’s practically feline, the way she’s moving, the intensity of her focus. Before he can react, her hands slip over his cheeks, into his hair; she pops up onto her toes, and her mouth opens against his.

The cereal boxes thud hollowly onto the floor as he goes stiff in surprise, just for a second before his arms reflexively wrap around her. Eyes closing, he sees flashes of New Earth behind his eyelids, of his new body and Rose’s fingers in his hair, her sucking his bottom lip between her teeth just like she’s doing now – except then, it had been Cassandra.

Now, it’s Rose,  _only_  Rose, her skin warm and soft, his hand pressing into the curve of her back, his nerve endings tingling and his tongue moving like it’s got a mind of its own. Definitely still a bit of an oral fixation in this version of himself, didn’t lose that with the metacrisis, and part of his still-entirely Time Lord brain begins cataloguing, in very precise detail, all the ways he wants to taste Rose Tyler.

Exploring, savoring, wondering how inappropriate it would be to trail his tongue along other parts of her body right now, he walks her backward until she bumps into a cereal shelf. It shudders, a cascade of boxes toppling onto the floor, and she hums. He opens his eyes and discovers she’s got hers open too – watching him, curious and shining with something else. _Arousal._

Face pressed against his, gazes locked, Rose runs her tongue across his top lip; without thinking, he sucks it inside his mouth, his chest fluttering as he tries to breathe.

When he was properly Time Lord, he had a bit more control over the way his body responded to things – now, it’s like he’s piloting a malfunctioning ship half the time. And right now this half-human ship is diverting fluids to places that don’t need fluid, places that definitely _shouldn’t_ be full of fluid in the cereal aisle at Tesco, nerve endings crackling with hyper-awareness and overloading from every little sensation (her hair across his forehead, her hot fingertips against his scalp, her curves pressing into him, chest and hips and thighs).

“You two! What do you think you’re doing!”

The Doctor stumbles back, clears his throat, blinks to try to clear his vision. Rose is still up against the shelves, her hands in the air, her lips parted and the tip of her tongue sticking out.

She tears her gaze away, pulling at the hem of her shirt down, stepping over the spilled cereal boxes as she gets away from the shelves. There’s a woman standing at the end of the aisle, cart full of groceries and her daughter – can’t be more than three years old – standing beside her. The mother’s frowning at them, her mouth open like she’s about to say something else, but before she can the little girl shouts at the Doctor, “Get a room!”

“Come on, Greta, we don’t need cereal this week,” the woman huffs, grabbing the girl’s hand and hauling her to the next aisle.

Rose starts giggling. She leans down, scooping up a box from the jumbled mess on the floor. “Definitely the one with the marshmallows.”

The Doctor reaches up to straighten a tie he isn’t wearing, ends up pulling at his collar instead. “Right. Good. Yes.” He holds out his uninjured hand, and she slips her fingers along his, threads them together.

Three days later, with the morning sun shining in through the small window in the kitchen of Rose’s flat, the Doctor is sitting cross-legged in a chair at the table, picking out little marshmallows from a large bowl of cereal, transferring them to a smaller bowl with the focused attention of a mechanic working on delicate machinery.

Rose appears in the doorway, wearing jimjams and a robe – he’s been sleeping on the couch, and she’s been sleeping in her bedroom, and that kissing thing hasn’t happened again, but the Doctor doesn’t mind one bit. Because every day, she’s been acting more like the Rose he remembers. Smiling, holding his hand, leaning against his shoulder, poking her tongue out at him whenever he does something daft.

She sits in the chair beside him, puts her elbows on the table and her chin on her palms, inspecting his work. “Got tired of the cereal, just having marshmallows for breakfast this morning?”

“These can hardly be called marshmallows,” the Doctor replies, frowning and shaking his head. “Little compressed bits of sugar, covered in dye – not fluffy, not tender, not anything like a marshmallow should be.”

“I don’t believe it. The Doctor, turning down a little bit of compressed sugar?” She reaches up, touches the back of her hand to his forehead. “You feeling all right? Feverish? Sick?”

“No, Rose, just let me show you.” Plucking a marshmallow from the bowl, he thrusts it in her face. She opens her mouth, sticks her tongue out. And he freezes, marshmallow pinched between his thumb and index finger.

“Go on then,” she says, words muffled because her tongue is still stuck out.

He drops the marshmallow, right onto her pink tongue. She draws it into her mouth, squints and quirks her mouth as she chews it. “Mmm. That  _is_  rather crunchy, for a marshmallow.”

“Couldn’t even make a proper s’more with that thing.”

Her eyebrows lift up. “What’s a s’more?”

“Oh, a dessert, from America.” He leans a bit closer, wondering if he offers her another marshmallow if she’ll stick out her tongue again. Without looking, he digs into the marshmallow bowl, plucks another one out, lifts it in front of her face. “Do you suppose the green ones taste any better?”

“Ought to have a good sample size, for scientific accuracy,” she replies, and out pops her tongue.

He drops the marshmallow onto it, and she draws it into her mouth, and he leans forward at the same time. His nose bumps her cheek, his lips pressing against hers. She tastes like minty toothpaste and sugar, her mouth a little bit sticky.

The Doctor draws back, studying her face, looking for any sign of … anything. Disappointment or disgust or unhappiness.

There aren’t any of those things. Just pink cheeks and a grin, Rose biting her bottom lip. She reaches across him and snatches the bowl full of marshmallows.

“Well if  _you’re_  not having them for breakfast, I am,” she says, hopping up from the table and going to fetch a spoon from the drawer beside the sink. “We’re due at Torchwood in an hour for our official debriefing.”

The Doctor rolls his eyes and picks up some of the cereal out of the big, marshmallow-less bowl in front of him. “Debriefing. Never was a fan of those. They’re  _never_  brief, for starters.” He looks up, quirks an eyebrow at her. “You had my old bit of psychic paper in your pocket at Canary Wharf in the other universe, didn’t you?”

She tips her head at him. “Yeah.” Spoons a pile of marshmallows into her mouth.

“Well if we’re going in to Torchwood this morning, we  _could_ use my psychic paper to requisition one of those official vehicles — y’know the ones with the enormous wheels, drive over anything — and  see how long it takes us to make it to the Cape of Good Hope.”

“Could do,” Rose replies, arching her eyebrows at him. “Might be more interesting to see Cape Dezhnev, though. Never been there before. Have you?”

A grin breaks over his face. “Nope.”

[allrightfine](http://allrightfine.tumblr.com/):

~~~~~

She loses her nerve at the very last minute.

The turn that would take them to the zeppelin port looms up ahead and they hadn’t packed or planned or anything, they were just going to  _go_ , she assumes. His hand in hers and new places to explore.

But right there, on the corner, as she reaches for her signal, is the coffee shop where her mum had listened to her after they returned from Bad Wolf Bay the first time.

She’d been unable to stomach the thought of going back to the empty mansion again right then,  and her mum had sat with her, passing the owner more money than they used to see in a week to keep the lights on and the coffee coming. Her mum had stayed, letting Rose get sad and angry and sad again.

They _will_  leave, she knows, but going now, not even a week after her mum had followed her across the universes, it doesn’t quite seem fair, and Rose is sick of hurting the people close to her.

They’ll take some time now, time to learn to be a proper family — all of them — and then they’ll go. Nothing will be able to stop them.

The Doctor watches her out of the corner of his eye as the light changes and she drives straight through the intersection.

"Soon," she tells him and he nods, hand reaching to twine with hers for a moment before she has to shift gears.

A manual had seemed like a good idea when she bought it, the more she had to focus on, the less her mind could wander to dangerous places, but now she wishes for the ease of an automatic and a hand free to hold the Doctor’s.

It might be easier for the Doctor, too. She’s only let him drive once, on a quick trip back to the shop for more pants, following a conversation that involved the question, “How could you possibly think two pairs of underwear would be sufficient?” And an incredulous look that implied  _she_  was the one being daft.

"One to wear and one to wash!" he’d said, like it was obvious, and she’d hustled him out the door, mumbling about laundry frequency and decidedly not thinking about how, with both pairs dirty now, he was probably going pants-less.

He’d scooped the keys up from her hands and spent the entire drive fighting a battle to find third gear. He’d lost, and her car hadn’t been the same since.

They make it to the debrief just as Jake is arriving with the donuts and she mentally winces — that had always been Mickey’s job and she’s barely even spared a thought to him, which makes her feel awful, even though he’ll be happier back in their original universe now.

The Doctor swoops in for one with icing and sprinkles and he’s eaten four more by the time they’re finally done, stepping out of the building just as the sun is setting.

Jake catches up to them as they reach her car, “Fancy a pint?”

She glances at the Doctor, who shrugs and then nods.

"Sure," Rose says. "But you’re sleeping at your own flat, so pace yourself."

Jake gives her a look that implies  he knows exactly why he’s sleeping elsewhere and Rose almost laughs. It’s clear from the twinkle in Jake’s eye that he is not imagining it’s because the Doctor’s been bunking on the sofa.

In fact, in some crazy fever dream hallucination where she may have imagined she’d end up with a part-human Doctor living in her flat, she probably wouldn’t have pinned him as sleeping on the sofa either.

Pinned him  _to_  the sofa, maybe. Not for sleeping though.

"Can I at least get a ride there?" Jake says. "I’ll take a cab home, I swear it."

Rose unlocks the doors and they all pile in. She drives them back to her flat so they can walk to the pub, the Doctor and Jake already running their mouths about who’s better at darts and pool and drinking without vomiting.

Jake had lost that round when Rose pointed out that two months ago he’d spent some one-on-one time with a bottle of tequila and ruined her ottoman.

The pub is noisy when they walk in, settling at a table while Jake makes a beeline for his favorite bartender. He returns with three pints of lager and a giddy look on his face.

"Why don’t you make a move already?" Rose says. "You clearly fancy each other."

Jake launches into a lengthy explanation of the intricacies of modern dating, but Rose is more caught up in the look the Doctor’s giving her, the small smile that sets off a blush across her cheeks, the one that seems to scream, “Speaking of people who fancy each other…”

Flying right in the face of the “play it cool” part of the speech he’s just given, Jake stands from the table and heads straight back to the bar, sitting down on a stool and all but leaning his chin on his palms with a dreamy look in his eye.

"Oh, he’ll be there for the duration now," Rose says. "I think that makes you darts champion by default."

The Doctor takes a swig of his beer and winks at her, pushing back in his chair, “Rose Tyler, I win nothing by default.”

He holds a hand out toward her, “Come on then, I’ve got to show  _someone_  up if I’m to be champion.”

She takes his hand and lets him tug her toward the dart board, laughing when he jogs back to the table to grab their pints.

"I believe this is an important part of the human darts-playing experience," he says, handing her the glass and lifting for a toast.

"Cheers," she says.

Two hours later the Doctor has proclaimed multiple victories over the dartboard, and over Rose, but he’s too far into the lager and it comes out all wrong.

"I am the dartboard victorious," he tells Rose. "And there’s no one to stop me."

Rose gives him one more pint, and promptly stops him, scoring down to zero while he’s still in the hundreds.

"Pool table victorious?" He says and Rose laughs. It’s a little weird in how weird it  _isn’t_  — out for a normal night, on a normal (parallel) Earth, normal chips and normal lager, with a man who is anything but normal.

"Pass," Rose says. "I’d just beat you at that, too."

The Doctor looks offended, “Were you hustling me? Rose, if we were in the Myglat Quadrant and you did that, you’d be promptly thrown in prison and then where would you be? Well, prison, I suppose. But you’d also be at the mercy of your traveling companion to come bail you out. And do you know what bail is in the Myglat Quadrant?  _Goats_. I’d have had to find at least eight goats for a crime of that nature. That’s an awfully large gamble to take, me finding those goats.”

Rose smiles up at him sweetly, the alcohol buzzing warm in her veins, “You’d find them.”

The Doctor tips his head down to look at her, he’s been matching her drink for drink, but his eyes are clear when he speaks.

"I have a feeling, Rose Tyler, that you might find them for me," he says.

She feels something coil low in her abdomen at his words; only the Doctor could make procuring goats seem intimate. She glances at Jake, but he’s still at the bar, mooning over the bloke behind it.

"Should we go back to the flat?" she says.

"Yeah," he says. "Let’s go home."

If her heart flips a little at that, at him calling her little flat, with four walls and a fixed size, “home,” she decides not to dwell on it.

~~~~~

Rose leads him out of the pub and takes the long way back, pointing out similarities and differences between this universe and her own. He’d noticed some of them that first morning, on walkabout by himself, but it’s better with Rose here.

"Best curry in the whole city," Rose says and points at a restaurant. "They’ve got this spicy one, just  _mental_  spicy, sort of like a challenge. Tim tried it once and —”

She snaps her mouth shut so quickly he can almost hear the sound of it.

"You can talk about him," the Doctor says, and realizes that he means it. If Tim or Mickey or Jackie or Jake made her happy, he wants to hear about it, wants to know she didn’t waste four years on thoughts of a lonely, old Time Lord with abandonment issues. Or is it commitment issues?

Whatever they are, he better sort them, and quick.

Rose gives him a searching look and he does his best to kept his face open and earnest.

"I mean it," he says. "Talk all you like, give me the scoop, the news, the dirt."

There’s a flash of panic when he realizes what the dirt probably entails and he rushes to correct himself, “Maybe not  _all_  the dirt. Not the  _dirty_  dirt, not the, um, well, the —”

Rose laughs, shoving at his arm and he makes a show of tripping down from the curb, “I wouldn’t,” she says, tongue snaking out to touch her teeth, like she’s thinking of adding more.

She slows their pace a little bit and then they’re stopping, facing each other. They’re nearly the same height with him in the street and her up on the sidewalk and he doesn’t miss the glint in her eye.

"Besides, wouldn’t want you jealous over what you haven’t had," Rose says and her tone is playful enough, sexy enough, that he can’t feel the sting of the words, not with all the heat behind them. All the promise.

He’s felt desire before, felt it in this body even. It was there for the three times he’s kissed Rose with these lips. It was there for the glimpses of her breasts, softly rounded in clingy t-shirts, her bum in those tight, new jeans, the smooth skin of her arms, her neck, her ankles — it was there for all of it, these bolts of  _want_  right through his veins.

But none of it felt like this, like he could have exactly what he  _wants_ , he just needs to ask, or take, if Rose will let him.

"Haven’t had? Or  _won’t_  have?” And oh god, he’s said that, he’s said it out loud, and he can’t unsay it. He fights the urge to slam his eyes shut, to close them tight against the thought that he’s misread the entire situation.

It’s too soon.

She doesn’t feel like that about this him.

She’s still in love with Tim.

All the possibilities tumble through his brain and he doesn’t realize he actually  _has_  closed his eyes until he feels Rose’s forehead lean against his, noses brushing, and her breath warm on his mouth.

"Haven’t had  _yet_ ,” she says and the rushing in his ears almost drowns her out. The hairs on the back of his neck raise, skin tingling, and the way time has slowed down, it’s different than it’s ever been before.

He can’t stop his mouth, can’t stop from checking, “It’s something I’m allowed to have though?”

His eyes are still closed and when Rose doesn’t answer him, when the air around them feels still and suffocating, he opens them to see her smiling at him.  Wide and bright and brilliant, it’s the smile of the last memories he’ll share with the other him, Rose Tyler, on a darkened street, beaming at him.

She’s all cheek as she leans into him, mouth hovering just in front of his, “If you want,” she says, and he closes the distance between them.

Her mouth opens instantly and he mirrors the movement, tongue sliding to twine with hers with a confidence he wishes the rest of him had.

His hands flounder for a moment, coming to rest on her hips and he curls his fingers into her belt loops, tugging her closer.

She comes willingly, her body flush against his as he tilts his head for a better angle. Rose’s fingers find the back of his head, nails scraping before she’s fisting her hands in his hair.

He likes that, likes the sharp pull, the way she’s guiding his movements, and his tongue stutters to a halt before he’s pulling back to kiss her neck, her shoulder, her collarbone.

He’s just begun to test with his teeth, light little nips against her skin that have her arching her hips into his, when suddenly she pulls back.

He tries to focus himself, to calm the rush of adrenaline and hormones singing in his blood, and he only catches the end of what she’s said.

"Probably past her bedtime, but we shouldn’t risk it," she says, and he’s fixated on the rise and fall of her chest, the flush spreading across the base of her neck.

"Huh?" Rose’s bedtime? Is he invited? He wants very much to be invited.

"Greta, from the grocery store? The little girl that told us to get a room?" Rose looks entirely too pleased and composed and he skates a hand down to her bum, cupping lightly as he pushes into her.

"Out of the mouths of babes, Rose Tyler," he says. "We should  _definitely_  get a room.”

Rose hops down from the curb to stand next to him on the street, twining their fingers and smiling.

"Run!"

~~~~~

Running back to the flat was admittedly not her best idea. They’re panting in the lift, laughing and staring and the Doctor keeps licking his lips like he can still taste her there.

If she’d have sat down, with a calendar, and tried to imagine when she’d be ready for this, when  _they’d_  be ready for this, it probably wouldn’t have been quite so soon. There’s Tim to think of, and the TARDIS, and years spent apart.

But it’s that last thing that really gets her, because really, it’s not that it’s too soon, it’s that it was almost too late.

The lift dings for her floor and she’s darting out ahead, laughing as he stumbles to catch up.

She gets the key in the lock on the third pass, swatting the Doctor’s hands as he reaches for the keys on a path that somehow includes brushing repeatedly over the front of her shirt.

They tumble into the flat and the Doctor leans down to unlace his trainers while she toes her own shoes off.

When he stands, he gives her a smirk she feels in her bones and then he’s loping off to the sofa, fluffing at the pillows there.

"Well, I’ve had a great night, better turn in," he says and oh, that’s how it’s going to be?

"Best do," she says. "I’ve got a few things to take care of in my room. Might get noisy, be sure to let me know if I’m keeping you up."

She walks toward the hall to her bedroom, unbuckling her belt and sliding it from the loops, dropping it to the ground as she passes him.

"Oh, now, if I’m going to be kept awake anyway, might as well help," he says, ducking around the sofa to grab her by the waist.

He backs her up to the wall next to her bedroom door, nipping at her earlobe as she starts on the buttons of his shirt.

She gets it undone and pushes at the material, laughing as he stretches his arms out behind him to get the sleeves down without removing his mouth from her skin.

"Come on, let’s do this properly," she says, moving sideways out from under him to get through her door.

He mumbles something that sounds suspiciously like an assertion that the hallway wall looks more than proper, but he follows her in anyway.

She hops onto the bed, walking on her knees toward the middle of it before turning to face him as he stands at the footboard.

He smiles at her and she smiles back, both of them nearly laughing with the sheer joy of the situation, that they’ve found each other, found themselves here. She catches his eye, fingers inching to the hem of her t-shirt.

"Naked victorious?" he says.

She winks at him, “Go!”

He starts on his trousers while she goes for her shirt, tugging it up and off before reaching behind her to unclasp her bra, tossing that away, too.

She moves to undo her jeans, fingers hovering over the button as she watches him drop his trousers to the ground, tugging his pants down after them.

He steps out of them with a filthy grin, leaning to pull his socks off. When he tugs his undershirt off she’s spurred back to movement, fingers making quick work of her button and zip, but it’s too late. He kneels on the bed as she flops to her back and he helps her pull her jeans off, taking her socks with them.

"I won," he says and then he’s looming over her, eyes trailing down her body and fingers following in their wake.

He skims wide circles around her breasts, narrowing as she lets out a growl. She pulls at his shoulders and he shifts so his knees are between hers before leaning down to kiss her.

It’s sloppy and wet, lacking hesitancy and finesse, and it’s  _perfect_.

She arches her hips up into him, body jerking as his fingers trail lower, skimming across her stomach before moving lower still.

Her hands are pulling at his hair, the skin of his back, his bum, and even though she’s suddenly very fond of his long, long fingers and the way they fit her, she’s more interested in the fit of other things.

She swats his hand away before turning to grip him, feeling a small swell of pride at the way he lets out his breath on a groan.

"Rose," he says. "I do want."

She shifts further back into the pillows, legs splaying wider.

"Have," she says.

And he’s replacing her hand with his own, positioning himself and pushing forward.

She groans this time, while he goes completely still, panting softly in her ear. She shifts her hips under his and it’s like lighting a fuse.

He braces his weight on his forearms, caging her in, and starts up a rhythm she can’t make out and instead gives herself over to, mouth, teeth, tongue against his shoulder and fingers curling into his skin.

It’s not long before she’s nearly there, so close she can feel it coiling low inside her and when he moves his arm, hand grabbing underneath her calf to bend her knee toward her chest, it’s just enough, the perfect angle and it’s only a few more pumps of his hips before she’s coming, a string of swear words and noises that don’t even sound like they’re coming from her.

He only lasts a few moments more, rhythm stuttering and then he’s following her, matching her words and something between a grunt and a groan at the end.

She locks her limbs around him, keeping him in place as he collapses onto her.

It’s a good weight though, not like the one she’s been carrying for years, the weight of something lost replaced with something gained.

She’s going to carry this one forever.


End file.
